Validating a linux installation? - Linux Setup, Configuration & Administration

[Doug]

Recently I spent several weeks upgrading some of my libraries so I
could install updated versions of gnome, kde etc. The one this I
discovered was how difficult it is to do it by hand and get everything
right.

After I have finished I found some software incorrectly found
libraries they shoudln't have and made dependencies on libraries that
where long ago updated.

I am no expert in Linux but what would be a great tool would be
package that:

1 - checked all the libraries to see of their dependencies exist. I
would think that you could do this by finding +x files and executing
ldd then taking the results and checking the existence- something like
this
find /usr/ %m+x -exec ldd {} | check_for_file \;

2 - Checked all the headers files to see if they point to something
that exists
3 - checked dangling symlinks

I am thinking someone has already thought of this and has developed a
little perl/bash script to do such a thing?

Anyone with ideas?

thanks
dn

[Nick]

Doug Nichols wrote: 

Many linux distributions come with package managers which handle this
portion of system maintenance for you (though some work better than
others). This is one of those "your mileage may vary" situations.

-Nick

[P.T.]

Doug Nichols <com> wrote: 

Sure. This is common as dirt.

Look for "binstats".

#!/bin/bash
# -*- sh -*-

# binstats - a Linux/i386 utility to find the number and identity of a.out
# 1.00 and ELF binaries, plus their debugging symbols status, setuid
# status and dynamic library dependence. The number of shell
# and perl scripts are counted. Also it looks for any duplicated
# executable name, unused libraries, binaries with missing
# libraries and statically linked binaries.

Peter

[Michael]

P.T. Breuer <it.uc3m.es> wrote:

[..]
 

[..]
 

Thx for the tip!

Looks as if you would use a pretty old version:
$ binstats -v
binstats-1.08

;)

Integrity of all installed rpm packages can be checked with something
like this:

$ for rpm in `rpm -qa`; do echo -e "\n$rpm\n" && rpm -V $rpm;done

(It doesn't look for missing libs though)

Regards

--
Michael Heiming

Remove +SIGNS and www. if you expect an answer, sorry for
inconvenience, but I get tons of SPAM

[Doug]

Michael Heiming <michael+heiming.de> wrote in message news:<heiming.de>... 
>
> [..]
> 
>
> Thx for the tip!
>
> Looks as if you would use a pretty old version:
> $ binstats -v
> binstats-1.08
>
> ;)
>
> Integrity of all installed rpm packages can be checked with something
> like this:
>
> $ for rpm in `rpm -qa`; do echo -e "\n$rpm\n" && rpm -V $rpm;done
>
> (It doesn't look for missing libs though)
>
> Regards[/ref]

This is great! Thanks everyone who responded. I have been slowly
removing the rpm's so I am not really using rpm anymore, otherwise rpm
would be a great option- I am trying to install/compile each package
from scratch. binstats seems to do exactly what I want.

thanks again.
dn

[Nico]

"Doug Nichols" <com> wrote in message
news:google.com...
 

If you discard package management, expect problems when updating. Tools like
"tripwire" can help detect changes in critical files, and tools like "epkg"
can help you keep multiple versions of newly-built software online and
switch from one to the other as needed.

But if you're going to work in the RPM-based world, I strongly urge you to
build your own SRPM's (which is fairly easy) and use those to install and
uninstall packages. This will ease package verification and update
procedures.